To Grit with Grace, Episode 1 — Randy Kaufman: Trifecta of Suck
Hello, I’m Randy Kaufman, and this is “To Grit with Grace,” stories of perseverance to jump-start your month.
For those of you who don’t know me already, I’m an independent wealth consultant. What that means is I work with high-net-worth individuals on family dynamics, philanthropy — really, on creating peace.
I’ve actually never liked podcasts. People talk for hours, they babble, and they hope they hit on some interesting pearls of wisdom along the way. I’d rather read a book.
But I’ve always been drawn to Ted Talks, and to stories with good structures and clear purposes. And that is why I pledge: My podcast will never be longer than 12–15 minutes, it will always give an interesting and often uplifting story, and hopefully it will buoy each and every one of us as we face a new month.
I actually knew I’d be the perfect guinea pig. As I reflect on my life, there’s one period that stands out as the toughest to survive in my many decades. It started in 2008, when my money, my marriage, and my body were all under siege. I like to call it my trifecta of suck.
Grit
The meaning of grit first came to me in my teenage years, living in a big, French Normandy house in northern Westchester. We had a basement like most basements, dark and dank. There was a tremendous wine cellar. Picture a bank vault with a huge steel door and a spinning lock.
As a kid, I’d always try to break into the wine cellar and take off the dusty wine bottles and see what else was going on in there. So I was in the wine cellar — I’d been in that wine cellar a million times — and I found a shoebox. And in that shoebox was picture after picture after picture of concentration camp victims piled very high.
My father had survived World War II, and talked about it occasionally. He always talked about how his hair went gray at the age fo 30 because he didn’t have food, and all of a sudden I understood what that meant to be in war trenches. My father made it through what was completely unimaginable to me. I understood perseverance, and grit, and realized, for the first time in my life that, as Robert Frost famously said, that the only way out is through.
My Money
But honestly, my life, I felt, was charmed, until 2007. Trauma for me? Let’s see, it was defined by not getting into Bowdoin College, and getting into Middlebury; not getting into Yale Law School, going to University of Chicago instead; at 3:00 a.m., at Paul Weiss, when I called my brother, hysterical that I missed an important tax regulation. Nothing that really mattered.
2008, a year that most of you will remember, actually was a really good year. I was sitting in Paris in September, eating bacon and toast, and I read about Lehman Brothers. It stopped me in my tracks, and I flew home worried, but I thought I’d be fine.
December 11th, 2008, the market kept going down and down and down. I’m running this business, and clients are depending on us. I walk into my office, bring my cofounder, we get into a conference room, and give the team a pep talk.
“We’re gonna be fine. We are resilient.”
(Little did I know what resilience meant.)
By the end of that talk, in walks a colleague, ashen white. Looks at me and Charlie, says, “Something horrible has happened, Bernie Madoff has been arrested.”
And my first thought was, “Let it be anything other than a financial fraud, cause that’ll destroy the financial markets.”
I’ll never forget that day. There was an ice storm. The streets of Boston, the cobblestone streets, were coated with ice. It was freezing cold. Phone lines were down. I couldn’t reach my mother in New York, who I spoke to twice a day. I couldn’t reach my husband. I was distraught, I was scared, and my fears were that my business would go under, that clients would blame us for not predicting the credit crisis, that I’d be destitute.
So the next six months were clearly the hardest of my life. I was shattered. I wanted to crawl under a rock and never be in wealth management again. I said to my cofounder, “I’m done. I’m, like, moving back to the country, I’ll be a dog-walker, I’ll be a landscaper.” And he said, “You owe it to your clients to stay in this business.”
It was a slog, and I remember every day — I was commuting to Boston, so I’d go in Mondays, come home Thursdays — I would drive in, and dread it, and dread it, and then I’d say to myself, “This will be fine.”
And it was turning my mind around — I had found a wonderful cognitive behavioral therapist who taught me that your brain is just a muscle, and I really turned my brain around. I also was fortunate to be surrounded by people who were uplifting, who loved me, who’d been through far worse.
One of my friends would always say, “It’s how you behave from now, it’s always how you behave. Remember, you have your ethics, your integrity; you did nothing wrong.”
Another friend said, “Think of Fiddler on the Roof and put yourself upon that roof and just look at this experience that you’re going through, and say, ‘Yeah, isn’t that interesting.’”
I would say, seven or eight months later I found myself walking in the park in Boston. It was a beautiful day, and all the sudden, I said, “This is all gonna be fine.” And I literally stopped worrying about it. And that is the first time I realized that true success comes to those with grit. It’s not intelligence. I believe it’s how you comport yourself, and I believe it’s how you think. For without perseverance, it’s self-fulfilling that you’ll fail.
My Body
Fast-forward to 2011. I was thriving again, I was ever-grateful. I’m back in my favorite city (besides Paris) which is New York City. I could breathe again, I felt ten pounds lighter, I felt joy and happiness, I was out with my friends, it was one of the most joyful returns, ever, of my life. Had a good job, and I’d made it through.
There was this lump in my breast, but of course, that was nothing.
I’m the sister of a very brilliant breast cancer oncologist. I’m an exercise addict. I didn’t drink for 20 years, didn’t eat meat for 25 years, I was never gonna get breast cancer, it was ridiculous. So I didn’t worry about it.
Columbus Day, 2011, I patiently waited by the phone for biopsy results. It was a vacation, I was home in the country with my dogs, I wasn’t worried about it. I got the biopsy cause my wonderful internist in New York said she’d never see me again if I didn’t. So anybody who’s ever heard the words, “You have cancer,” knows how life-changing that truly is.
So my first reaction was just to crumble on the stairs, and say, “I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, and I won’t.” And I was just gonna give up. So what was I gonna do? Ignore it all, see what happens, probably end up dead? Who knows.
And then, I channeled words from Obama: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and deal with it.
So then ensued two years in which I had five surgeries. I decided that if I dreaded the surgeries I would turn a bad situation into a worse situation. So I went into each surgery thinking, “This is fine.” I remember joking to somebody, “Goddammit, by the fifth one it’s no different than a bikini wax, so let’s just get this over with.” But you sort of get used to it.
And I vividly remember somebody telling me when I was diagnosed — and this was a young woman who had been through a much more aggressive form of cancer at the age of 26, she was an inspiration to me — she said, “In five years, you won’t even remember the day you were diagnosed.”
The success of getting through the cancer was five years later, a nurse said to me, “When were you diagnosed?” And I said, “I don’t know.”
Grittiness for me is a mindset. It was the storytelling that I always tell myself, “I’m gonna be destitute, my career is over,” and that wasn’t remotely true. I had a thriving career. It was the story of telling myself, “I might have chemo, I might have radiation, lose my job,” and I sort of learned to stop telling myself these stories. Or, if I was gonna tell myself these negative stories, okay, but concoct a good story at the same time.
Years later, I went to Hadestown — there was a Middlebury connection —and heard lyrics that I’ve never forgotten. They were:
The meanest dog you’ll ever meet
Ain’t the hound dog in the street
The dog you’ve really got to dread
Is the one that howls inside your head
My Marriage
And then, the worst of all of those things was my divorce in 2014 and 2015. I have to say, after watching my business be decimated, after dealing with cancer, after five/six surgeries, I never thought I’d be tested again. And the divorce, I think, was harder than the first two.
The reason why, is it wasn’t meant to happen — regardless of the fact that most of my friends were divorced, my parents weren’t. For years and years I had a tape in my head that said, “Perfect people don’t get divorced.” And it took me years to recognize that I wasn’t helping anybody by staying in that marriage.
But tearing a family apart, even without children, is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s expensive, it’s messy — try losing 50% of your assets twice in a decade. In part, you never know if you’re doing the right thing.
I just have to say that all these years later, I know it was the right thing to do, and as I work with clients, I often say the same thing to them, and it really comes back to the pain, the guilt, the sorrow, the sadness, and that the only way out is through.
If you had ever said to me, then, that in five years, I’d be remarried, I’d have two dogs, I’d be happier than I’d ever been in my 60 years, I would’ve said you were crazy.
Call it What You Will
Call it perseverance, call it resilience, call it grittiness; every successful person I know has a story of how they got through, and that is what has inspired me to launch this podcast. I hope all of you will come along for the ride. We’ll be back next month with another speaker’s tale of struggle and perseverance. In the meantime, I wish you a happy Valentine’s Day, and always, with grit, with grace, with growth, and so much gratitude.
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